myself from any existing or future investigation of any matter relating in any way with the campaigns for president of united states. i went on to say that this announcement should not be interpreted as confirmation of the existence of any investigation or suggestive of the scope of any such investigation. jeff: several top democrats have called for sessions to resign. president trump has remained stoutly behind him. joining us from washington is eric lichtblau and karen tumulty. thank you both for joining us. what is next on the sessions' front? karen: i think what is next is what has been going on along, which is the sort of drip of more and more reports of contacts of people in the president's circle with the russians or russian officials. what is really surprising, i think at this point, and perhaps it is a reflection of the fact that the white house is populated primarily with campaign aides and not seasoned washington hands is that the trump team seems to have not gotten its arms around what the facts are here. who had contacts, how many. if they don't, it appears like this could be headed toward some outside, either a select committee or some kind of outside investigation. there is talk on the hill, i don't not how far that would get, about the need for some kind of special prosecutor in this. unless the white house and president can get ahead of all of these revelations, it is going to turn into something bigger. jeff: is that why they are not getting ahead of this? because they are not the insiders? karen: i think that is one explanation. of course, the first impulse, the first rule in the playbook on a campaign is if somebody hits you, you hit them back. people who have been around these sorts of issues from the perspective of having been in government for them know that the first thing you do is you get your facts straight. i think another problem here is the president's tendency to personalize what are big issues with big implications. and so, he has framed this in tweets, in his statements as some sort of beefing on the part of democrats over the fact they did not win the election, as opposed to an actual threat to the security of the country. he has not denounced the russians. he has not talked about getting to the bottom of this. he has not talked about how the united states should respond. jeff: another rule is if you know there is something bad, you try to put it out on your own terms in the first place. if you don't know it in the first place, you cannot put that out to begin with. let's talk about the circle of russian contact. karen mentioned it is wider than just jeff sessions. how wide is that circle right now? eric: we are learning more every day about trump campaign people who had contacts with russian officials. jeff sessions was the big one this week. mike flynn two weeks ago. he was fired for not being candid about his relations with the same ambassador during the transition. we are hearing more names. carter page, gordon. as karen said, a drip, drip, drip. that is the daily impact of all of this. it is notable mostly because of all the denials from the white house, from trump himself, and his aides that there had been any contacts. they have been categorical for weeks into the inauguration in saying there were no contacts, this is fake news. and now you have this contact coming out which jeff sessions , explains as routine and nothing insidious. there is always the axiom in washington that the cover-up is worse than the crime. if they had been more forthright and if the white house had known these contacts have happened, they could have gotten ahead of it. now it looks like they are denying something that turned out to be true. we have seen these pictures of surrogate kislyak. eric: he is a longtime washington presence. he has been the ambassador to washington for nine or 10 years. he is known for throwing excellent parties. he knows how to work washington in terms of going to washington events, inviting prominent people, current ambassadors, future ambassadors from the u.s. to the embassy, also to the russian version of camp david outside maryland where he hosts some fabulous parties. the last few months with all of the talk about russia's meddling in the election has made him a little bit of -- i don't want to say persona non grata, but has caused a chill with people being less willing to socialize or take meetings with them. jeff sessions has now found that out himself. jeff: the word spy is thrown around. russians push back on that severely. and we know the role of sergei kislyak? karen: the rumors have long been out there that he is either a spy recruiter or gathering intelligence himself. let's face it. that is part of the ambassador's job, to learn as much as possible. you are right. the russians are pushing back against that. they are saying he is a top-notch diplomat, not a spy. again, this has been sort of the reputation he has had, especially in intelligence circles in washington. eric: i don't think it matters whether he is really a covert spy. there are public denials that he isn't. he is outwardly gathering intelligence. he does not have to sneak around in shadows. he is meeting with prominent washington people and no doubt passing reports back to moscow that end up in the hands of intelligence agencies that i just met with senator sessions, the key foreign-policy advisor for the republican nominee. whether he is officially a spy or not is almost irrelevant i think. jeff: to that point, part of his job is meeting with lawmakers, whatever side of the aisle they are on and whether that contact is inappropriate or not. eric: the question we are all asking in washington is whether these contacts were evidence of something more sinister. was there collusion? that is the word the democrats keep using. was there just contact? which had been denied for a long time. or was there more active engagement during the election season? when of course remember, the , russians were actively hacking into the d.n.c. emails and john podesta's emails and giving those to wikileaks and doing serious harm to the election. was there anyone in the trump campaign that knew about or was involved in that effort? that is the ultimate question here. kislyak-sessions meeting in particular in september was in the primary heat of the campaign, correct? karen: yeah. but i really think had he been forthright about this in his confirmation hearing when he was under oath, had he been forthright about this, had he said i had this meeting in the course of my duties as a senator and we talked about foreign-policy, it might have caused a stir for a day or two. the real damage now is being done by the fact that he said there had been no contact. and then he had come back and tried to parse his sentence and claim he said something he did not which was there had been no , communication about the campaign. that is not what he said. jeff: he has two issues. he has the testimony and the written response. eric: sure. i was at the press conference yesterday and asked him directly, did the campaign or trump's name come up? he said, well, i don't recall, which is never a good line in washington. he said, you know these , ambassadors gossip about politics. it was in the middle of the campaign, but i don't specifically recall politics being discussed. that seemed like an evasive answer. karen: especially at that time. in washington, people were discussing the election with strangers on the subway. jeff: one can understand why the administration would push back against a potential special prosecutor. it happened with bill clinton. it resulted in his impeachment. what might the timeframe be or where are the swells going as far as any potential special prosecutor involved in the russian investigation? karen: first of all, there is no law now that allows the kind of independent counsels we saw during the clinton administration. the independent counsel statute has expired. it could not be thus sweeping, wide ranging, you don't know where this is going kind of investigations we saw in the late 1980's and 1990's. but it is just hard to say where it goes. if these kind of revelations keep coming on a daily and sometimes practically hourly basis, there is going to be something. by the way, that is not the only model we have. there is also the possibility the president himself might want to call for something, some sort of commission headed under bipartisan respected leadership, the way ronald reagan did as iran-contra was breaking, the way george bush did after 9/11 when there were growing questions about what happened to allow the attacks, what we could do to prevent them in the future. there is an argument that could be made that perhaps the president should step out here and say, look, we need to get to the bottom of whether this is a threat to our security and what we should do about it. jeff: for democrats now, russia is the first, second, and third point of attack? eric: absolutely. they obviously thought jeff sessions recusing himself in the case was not enough. they called for his outright resignation. they called for an investigation into possible perjury in what he told the judiciary committee. they obviously can make some political hay out of this for quite a long time. having been on the defensive as long as they have, you clearly see them seizing that. jeff: karen, this is a big story that has consumed much of the end of this week at least. a week that started relatively speaking on positive terms for the president after the speech on tuesday night. from your reporting and what you have seen, how much disappointment is there from the white house right now that the positive notes have soured? karen: i think there is a great deal of frustration. not only from the white house, but their republican allies on capitol hill because one of the antidotes to all of this is for the president to be seen governing. for the conversation in washington to switch from this to his policy agenda. and if so many of those initiatives were not running into trouble on capitol hill, that might actually happen. that is what he was trying to do with his speech earlier this week. jeff: eric, what can we anticipate, whether this story or the tentacles that come from it over the weekend and into next week? eric: i think there probably will be more revelations in the media as there have been all this week. with his speech earlier this next week, i think the focus will be on, somewhat surprisingly, on the confirmation hearing for the deputy attorney general, u.s. attorney general of maryland who will be overseeing this investigation now that sessions has recused himself. that will turn into an unexpected event over russia because that has landed in his lap, and he is about to come up for confirmation. i think that will be the immediate focus and you will see ongoing calls from democrats and even some republicans like jason chaffetz and congressman mccarthy for further action. republicans called for recusal , which they now got. i think the public in general just want answers. i think there is a lot of confusion out there and a lot of unanswered questions as to what really happened. you see people wanting, trying to get to the bottom that as best you can. jeff: karen, the twitter countdown clock has been reset with the president's talk of democrats and what he considers their obstruction on his appointees? karen: you know, i think that is true as well, although he now finally does have a cabinet. jeff: eric lichtblau and karen tumulty, we appreciate your time. karen: great to be here. eric: pleasure. ♪ jeff: "how the hell did this happen?" that is the title of the latest book by political satirist p.j. o'rourke. the subtitle, "the election of 2016." it is a no holds barred look at the presidential campaign and critique of the candidates, the press, political punditry, and even analysis of how he, a diehard republican, ended up endorsing hillary clinton. he joins us now from new hampshire. i am pleased to welcome him to this program. thank you for being here. p.j. : thank you for having me. jeff: let me start with this. you say, if my book lacks coherent narrative, it is because i could not find one. have you found one yet? >> i looked everywhere. i looked in all the places i usually leave my cellphone. no, the coherent narrative was not there. well, that is not really true. we are in the midst of a worldwide populist rebellion, that would be maybe putting too strong a term on it, but there is a worldwide -- let's call it a rebellion. oism inis perfect, neo-ma china is part of it putin is , part of it. as i point out in the book, even the politics of australia. the politics of australia are so dull that the name of the conservative party is the liberal party. but they have had five prime ministers in six years. so all over the world, there is some sort of discomfort with the elites, rebellion against the establishment going on, manifesting itself in various different ways. here it manifested itself in a baffling man. who is now president. jeff: a big part of the rebellion is populism. a lot of the book is funny. you do take a more serious look at this populism at the end of the book. what do you make of it? pj: it makes me extremely uncomfortable. it really does. populism can end up being williams jennings bryan, incompetent and kind of funny and comic, or it can end up the way it did in many places between world war i and world war ii. it can wind up really ugly. i am hoping we are having -- history occurs first as tragedy and again as comedy. i hope that is what is going on at the moment. but i am not laughing really hard. jeff: what do you make of the president at the moment right now? this speech to the joint session of congress got so much attention earlier this week. a lot of people said he appeared more presidential. did you sense a shift or do you sense a shift? pj: well, you know, he's a good actor. one thing i talk about in the book is that no journalist ever watched "the apprentice." that is not because we are smart or sophisticated or because it was below us. it is because we are in the media. none of us need to hear "you're fired" ever again. we all know what the state of the media is like so we had not , watched him on "the apprentice." if you watched him you realize , alec baldwin has nothing on the donald trump that donald trump does. he is a good actor. whatever you call that, the state of the union, except you don't know what the state of the union is because you have only been there a week address. he was acting like a president and doing a pretty good job of it. what that means, if anything, i don't know. jeff: you started to put together this book. it is more a collection of what you observed during the campaign. obviously, that changed very quickly from week to week and day to day. in the end, you did endorse -- off the top, we said you are a diehard republican. the better term is libertarian and have been for a long time. pj: i am a libertarian. but it has been a long time since i have voted for anybody but a republican. jeff: you did endorse hillary clinton this time. pj: i did. jeff: you went through a long discussion of how little you think of her, yet you still ended up endorsing her. by the way, that has been the case for a long time as well. do you have regrets about that? pj: no, i don't. i did it for -- one of the things about libertarianism is the political attitude is supposed to be based on reason. there's something in the financial market called the volatility index. you can go into the commodities market and buy a prediction on how volatile markets will be. it is called the fear index. my fear index was, i think rationally, quite high with trump. i just felt the man was opaque to me. i did not know what he was going to do. i disagree with hillary about practically everything. i think i said in my endorsement, dorothy and toto's house fell on her and i still endorsed her. i knew what i was getting with her. you know, we had eight years of barack obama, a kindred, more likable kindred spirit with hillary. we survived those eight years. we would survive another four. i think four would be all it would be because americans tend to shift parties after eight or at the max, 12 years. i figured we lived through eight years of obama without terrible damage and we could live with four of hers. whereas with trump, might be ok, who knew? i was once talking to a friend of mine in the commodities business about the volatility index. i said, you have all of these greek letters and formulas about measuring volatility, measuring risk. he said, let me tell you a secret. if you could measure risk, it would not be risk. jeff: that is very true. america does volatility very well, no matter where you come down. you flay pretty much every candidate who was running in this last election cycle, maybe other than rand paul who did not last long. pj: no, he did not. i did like rand. jeff: i wonder if you were impressed by someone other than rand, or if you see someone in the future that you can get behind. pj: yeah, actually, there were a couple of people i thought were fine. i went to see jeb bush at a town hall meeting, really intimate, a little town, peterborough, new hampshire, close to where i live. there were only a couple of hundred people there. he was excellent, truly excellent. completely believable. went to another one in the same town with kasich. i thought he was very solid. i don't see either of those guys coming back for another try. marco rubio, aside from not looking old enough to drive, i saw him where i am sitting at the moment at saint anselm college in new hampshire. again, fairly small crowd. he was very good. and then he had a contentious crowd and was very reasonable, patient, brief, and yet substantive in the way he answered questions. i think he just needs a little more time, a little more aging barrel.the old oaken i heard him today on is jeff sessions a secret agent or whatever it was. rubio gave a good, measured reply about how we want the truth. we don't want partisan truth, we want the truth-truth. jeff: in the book, you talk about how it may be a long time, even though we have dealt with these controversies every single day, it is an active time for punditry and everyone else over the past six weeks. you also say it will take a little while for this to play out. how long do you think, and when might we be able to assess all that has happened in the last two years? pj: when a new president comes into office, things are always some degree of a mess. there is extra partisanship that comes in. usually in the form of a honeymoon. stories from the first month or so of obama, i seem to recall repeated reports of his walking on water and so on. but actually even george w. bush -- i can remember somebody saying something positive about dan quayle right at the beginning of george h.w. bush's. this is a little unusually negative. but the truth is the beginning of all administrations are a mess. we certainly have to give it 100 days. this is a particularly incoherent -- one of the things that bothers me about having donald trump as president is that it seems to be absolutely intellectually incoherent and ideologically incoherent. people are bothered about steve bannon as the ideological force behind the trump administration. there is no such thing as an ideological force behind an administration that has absolutely no ideology. maybe after 100 days, we get a clearer idea of whether the office and institution suck him in and make him behave in a more or less normal fashion. jeff: do you agree bannon has that view that is more ideological? pj: he is ideological. but i am not seeing a man in trump that listens a lot. you know, this is a pretty narcissistic personality. i have to say i have trouble figuring out -- it is like trump is looking so closely in the mirror that when we look at trump, we are looking at the back of the mirror. i don't feel like i have any sense of knowing this guy. you sort of know him, because he is the guy on the last stool in ♪ i don't feel like i have any sense of knowing this guy. you sort of know him because he is the guy on the last stool in the bar between you and the men's room and you are inclined to hold it because you do not want to have to go past that guy. the guy that is sometimes funny, always loud. sometimes has a point. sometimes is really off the reservation. that is always going on. this is interesting because trump does not drink, so how he got the position as the guy at the end of the bar, i am not positive. he is a pretty opaque character. >> you make a striking comment about that, the last line of the book, which i don't want to it isfor n anyone, but worth checking out. i want to return to this notion of deleted some, which has been discussed, and populism. you also say that individual freedom is about bringing things together. politics is about dividing things up. this is not a new concept. >> yeah, that is what makes -- >> it seems pretty important right now. >> yeah, well, the reason i am basically a libertarian, i'm a conservative, but my ideology is libertarian, because i worry about big government. and i think we have a perfect example here for everybody across the spectrum. i worry, you know, i watch liberals build a bigger and bigger government, and now, i'm watching them when somebody else has gotten behind the wheel of this monster truck government, turned it around and run them down with it. and they are all shocked and weepy. i'm going, make it a kiddie car, shrink the size of the monster truck. at worst, it smacks you in the shins. i think private individuals are a creative force, and what politics basically does is take the fruits of our creation and redistribute them, and i do not mean that as some attack on the welfare system. i mean, military spending is a form of redistribution, too. even infrastructure, which we are no doubt in need of in this country. that is a form of redistributing the fruits of individual enterprise, and we don't want none of that, but we just have to be careful about the size of the device we create to do that job. a you mentioned the big dig couple of times in the book, in boston, the project ended up costing a lot more and longer than people expected, but you would agree that some infrastructure reconstruction is needed. >> yes, it is, although in the case of boston, i remember when they built the expressway that the big dig replaced. i was college-age going out to visit friends who were obviously smarter than i was because they were going to a college in boston, not ohio. so i remember when nothing went up, and it should have never been built in the first place, you know. infrastructure is not like a simple good. what you build and where you build it and how well you budget thing needs to be carefully analyzed. >> what do you make of the media versus trump, whether it is real or not or manufactured to any extent, or is it theater? i mean, why in your estimation is the president sort of taking the approach he is, and what do you think the appropriate response should be from the media's side? >> well, there is always in the media's relationship with the whole world, always an adversarial side. nobody wants to go to a play with no drama in it or see a movie with no tension in it. you know, it is part of our job to stir the pot. i always say about plays and movies, i will not go to see a play without a sword fight or a movie without a car chase. and so, part of media opposition to trump is simply the natural order of things. you can get serious about it and say we are speaking truth to power. i think we are getting a little about ourselves when we do that. that is easy. jinping, you stink. it is easy for me to speak truth to power as long as i am far enough away from the power. but then there is also an aspect that has happened in the media that makes trump i think harder for media people to understand, and then maybe he would have done a century ago. ,hich is, once upon a time being like a newspaper reporter and even relatively recently, a blue colored trade. if you grew up like i did a shanty irish, and you did not want to get up early in the morning or lift heavy things, you could essentially be a newspaper reporter or a priest. [laughter]+++ >> i mean, you could be a cop, but then you would get shot at. or firemen, and that's dangerous. but if you like to read and did not like to lift heavy things, it was --, so, over the years, i blame nixon for this. nixon was at fault for a lot of things. when watergate came along and all the presidents men, a whole a lot of people that should join the peace corps became newspaper reporters instead to save the world. [laughter] >> i don't think we have ever recovered from that problem. >> pj, you have a couple young kids. one of them, you mentioned a couple times in the book, from their perspective, i know you have paid attention to that, what do you think that generation makes of what has happened here? >> it's interesting. my 19-year-old is at college, and i'm sure this has something to do with being 19. what she is most interested in is women's rights issues, specifically abortion. i mean, she sees that as fundamental, and i think that has been a terrible mistake from the conservative side for quite a while. i mean, i am personally opposed to abortion, morally opposed to abortion, but i think it is very, very, a private choice. >> on that note, pj o'rourke, the book is called "how the hell did this happen?" very good to see you, sir. >> you are very welcome. ♪ live-stream your favorite sport at the airport. binge dvr'd shows while painting your toes. on demand laughs during long bubble baths. tv everywhere is awesome. the all-new xfinity stream app. xfinity. the future of awesome. ♪ >> i am molly haskell, author of the book "steven spielberg: life in films," filling in for charlie rose. we have a filmmaker, documentarian, and visual artists. her work in the 1950's and 60's helped to pioneer the french new wave film movement. she is in new york for an art exhibition at a gallery on east 56th street. a special event presented by a rendezvous with french cinema will take place in honor of the work. i'm pleased to have her at this table for the first time. welcome. >> hello. molly: it is so great to see you. we go back a very long way. you told me ahead of time not to say how long, so i won't. your show is incredible. the first room i went into has a huge photograph of the ocean, then there is a film of the ocean waves rippling and a soundtrack, and something, a canvas, almost like sand. it is a transporting moment. >> it is real sand. >> it is real sand. guest: i wanted to do a presentation of the seaside. molly: you somehow managed to combine -- i mean, this goes back a long way, but the documentary and the imaginary in one, but people would assume that nobody wanted to leave. it needs a bigger room because people are just absolutely fixated. guest: because it is based on contemplation. molly: calm. guest: calm, and we are in a world that is moving so much. films and everything, there is so much action. this peaceful look, contemplating something we all know and love in a way, the seaside. molly: it is a quiet ocean, isn't it? is the soundtrack action from that particular ocean or -- guest: we all know what is the feeling being near the sea when it is calm. and we hear the [wind sounds]. it is something that everybody can feel where ever they have seen it or felt it, so the piece is called seaside. i am impressed because people sit and stay. molly: i can't believe it. it is absolutely mesmerizing. in the next room, you had something that reminded me of one of your colleagues in the early days of filmmaking. the picture, a 1967 photograph, and then you have re-created it as a drama. guest: i have always been interested in images. the frame of image, but also what is an image? it is a snapshot. you come, you see people, and then -- molly: family. >> maybe people you never met, that you see somewhere. and i'm always questioning, who are they? how did they happen to be together at the same place? do they know each other. did they know each other? so i made a kind of screenplay that could be possible. molly: it's wonderful. guest: is always using my imagination, but asking the people to look at the images, to wake up their own imagination, because each image is a mystery, even things that we know that it is, ok. molly: you used local actors and gave them a script? guest: no, no. it is people, i like them to come into my art project. molly: just ordinary people? guest: my neighbor. this one is the plumber of my village and his mother and another woman with a teacher, but i say, would you like to come into my dream, becoming a film? and they say yes, and i told him what i felt, and they became what i was feeling, and i have done that very often, but this is not a documentary. when i do a documentary, i respect their own life, their own worlds, and that is what i have been doing. recently, you know, i just finished a feature, documentary length, with jr, the artist jr, and we did together a trip in france in some villages, some small villages, and we met people, and together, we asked them to speak about what they feel, what they see, and we make sometimes big images of them and i make them, their worlds -- molly: value? the worth? >> their value, their worth. i make them the star. molly: that was the first one where you scavenged, sort of a scavenged discovery of cast-off things that nobody pays any attention to. guest: nobody listens to. the same way i did a work on the widows. nobody listens to widows. they are supposedly boring, and now when i did that thing, we went to villages where people were working, a girl was serving in a bar, and people working in a factory, where there is a lot of danger. we ask these people to be with us, and we build some strange things. in the harbor, we used the containers to make like a lego construction. we tell them we want to be artists with them. molly: they collaborate? guest: yeah, they collaborate, they get involved. they like to feel that they have with us, to be artists because we are not a category and such. molly: you've always had this decentralized sense of film, something that is not just handed down and imposed on people, but they bring to you. even something like back a bond, that wonderful film you made. >> that the fiction. molly: the idea of young girls and you have different people giving different perspective on it. >> real people. but you see in the installation that i am showing right now, i very excited because some of am these people have been reenacting a still photo. they were people i met again. they are not actors at all. i said, look at that image. we try to imitate it. we bought a dress to the woman acting, looking like the dress in the picture. we play that we are doing that picture, and it played a game with us. molly: family photographs on vacation is something everyone has taken and they are trying to remember what was going on before and after and why is he holding the babies now. >> i like to have unknown people together. i like to have non-people together. molly: they were not a family at all. agnès: does it make a family, a history? could we believe something happened between this one and this one? so i think i have my imagination, not i would say working, but alive all the time. molly: even in something like the "creature," where the people , a guy is a writer, the people in the village become imaginary people. you have a sense of no boundaries between the real and the imaginary kind of. agnès: that's right. reality is so difficult, so tough. the whole world is an incredible, difficult reality. if we can reinvent reality, make it more sensible, more near us, so it makes sense that we meet people, that we share with them something, stories of a motion, spectacles, something. but having fun together. molly: it is also because you realize with the politics now that a lot of people feel less out. they feel there are people with an artistic center in the world and other people who are just nobody's come and you are somehow of giving the feeling that they are not nobodies, and you have always known that. agnès: french cinema is very strong and has become more known at the time, the new wave, but now we have a lot of directors , and women directors. a lot of them came here with the french cinema today event. molly: i met you when you came up in 1967, and it was "le bonheur," the story of a pop singer who is waiting for a diagnosis because she may have cancer, and it was really of a feminist found. so many french films are women walking, beautiful male directors, and these beautiful women, girls on the cusp of womanhood, and they are there for the pleasure of a male who is looking. agnes: no, you make it too much. molly: don't you think french cinema has a lot of those, kind of women walking? agnès: what is the sense of a woman? molly: but yours is a woman, a woman with a sensibility. to find aas trying radical way of doing cinema, more than telling that story than another one, trying to make the cinema be like the other arts. painting has moved. literature has moved. cinema was still telling stories like coming from a book or play. molly: when you use that phrase -- writing? agnes: because i want cinema to start from cinema, from the inspiration that he is very real life, and then from real life, inventing a shape of touching people. i don't want them to crime, scream, to be afraid. i'm against the film in which -- molly: no drama. agnes: will he kill her? is he behind the door? is he behind the door? but i like to work on something which is sensible, in which may be the people watching the film get to feel what is presented, what is proposed. so i have been doing the life of a photographer and then a life of a filmmaker, and then i switch with an old filmmaker to a young visual artist, and in the last 10 years, i have been doing mostly installations, exhibitions, using old photographs, mixing them with video, trying to reconcile the beaches. molly: you are not even a beach person, and yet you have these wonderful installations and movies. you would find a picture of two young boys and then you find they are now old men and you bring them to that. i mean, that is the way -- met, youhen we were a young person. : when we met, molly, you were a young person. i met them when they were young. this is a long time ago. what we still share his love for movies, love for experimentation, adventure, because trying to invent cinema, and you do work by a reading, understanding, sharing what you know and understood about cinema, sharing it with people who go to movies. that's what the work has been . molly: i knew your husband, some critics, and we both had marriages in which love and movies were intertwined, and we had a tremendous rapport on that level and you made a wonderful movie about jaques. have you heard about "la la land?" it is very much attribute. agnès: when he speaks about the film, he pays tribute to him himself. he was 17 and he changed his life and decides to become that filmmaker. and you know what we did when he came to paris, he invited us and said can i come over to your place? being in the courtyard, he was touched, like a kid. i have said ok, you have done a film. come on. and he said it has been so important in my life. i say, what a nice boy. molly: the effect that you and your fellow new wave directors had in the 1960's and early 1970's on american filmmaking is just indescribable, and you must know that. i remember when you came over with "le bonheur" and mike nichols came. remember member the screening? i was interpreting and your english is not as great as it is now, and mike nichols was there and was so moved. you remember that? you are part of the left bank group. that distinction that was you and others, the sort of intellectuals. agnès: we were on the left side of politics and we lived on the left side of the river, which was very strange. molly: it is strange when you think about it. then the others were considered the right bank, just movie maniacs, and the ones that would come up and were influenced by american films. agnès: it was a time of very incredible -- molly: creativity. agnès: like spring, like flowers opening. molly: this is what i can't yet. it is almost like you have had 10 careers. you kept going with the same curiosity and creativity now for all these years, and just going in whatever direction drew you. agnès: i'm lucky to have kept that desire to experiment something. in this exhibition that i show, i never had the experience to put the seaside on the fifth floor. people forget they are in new york. molly: that's right. you go up in this tiny little elevator and suddenly the room opens up. agnès: that is what we mean. so i'm here in an exhibition and that makes me very happy because i see people coming. people who love films and art and then young people. molly: there were young people yesterday. what is going to happen with the rendezvous? what happened on march 10, what is that? agnès: they asked me to -- i would present a renoir film -- yes, and then i would speak about my work. because i come to new york, they grabbed me and say to do this and this and this. next time, i won't say nobody come. the program was a delight for me to see you again. molly: you're just an inspiration. i was flagging and i went to the show and i thought, my god, if she can do it, i have to do something. it's just wonderful. i am just soaking up yours, and i cannot wait to see what you do next. so great to see you. agnès: what i said yesterday, it is the last part of my life, and so much good -- so many good things happen to me. i work. i do a lot, but there is an answer to that. it is the answer from the people come to see. the answer from the people you are working with, the collaborators. the energy comes back and forth between you and then, it is a glorious thing. agnès: the energy can be shared and the emotion, jokes, spirits. i don't think we lose -- molly: the humor, too. i think people do not talk quite as much about your humor. even in the photographs, there is a kind of sly humor in them, and you are very funny person. agnès: yes, well, i'm glad you got what i'm trying to propose, and it works sometimes. molly: congratulations. agnès: thank you, molly. it was beautiful to see you. molly: you too. ♪ ♪ yousef: president trump signs a new travel order, six muslim majority nations are on the list, but iraq escapes the ban. >> the international energy asncy sees a modest recovery supply cuts boost prices. aramco's green energy push widening its appeal, but critics say they are over buying the jewel in its crown. >> ready to